Over and Over by Becky Hunter Summary: A Soulmate Time Loop
Introduction
On the twentieth anniversary of her younger sister’s drowning, thirty-year-old Lissa steps into traffic on a Bath street and is pulled back by a stranger named Ash.
What follows is not a romance built on coincidence, but a series of vivid sensory episodes that feel less like dreams and more like remembered lives.
In Over & Over, Becky Hunter sets modern Bath against historical Paris, New York, Scotland, and Cornwall, tracing two souls who keep meeting, loving, and dying too early.
The novel follows Lissa as she tries to understand what these visions are telling her.
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Who Will Enjoy This Book?
Readers drawn to reincarnation romance, magical realism, grief-centered family drama, and time-loop structures with an emotional rather than action-driven focus.
TL;DR: The Loop at a Glance
- Premise: A woman begins recalling past lives shared with the same man, each ending in a fatal accident.
- Setting: Contemporary Bath, with flashbacks to 1920s New York, 1950s Paris, the 19th-century Scottish Highlands, and Cornwall.
- Core tension: Lissa believes her love for Ash is what keeps killing him.
- Structure: A linear modern narrative interrupted by past-life memory sequences that gradually reveal the pattern.
- Emotional register: Bittersweet and introspective, with a hopeful resolution.
- Resolution type: The cycle breaks only when Lissa chooses her own path first.
Characters In This Book
| Character | Role |
|---|---|
| Lissa (Alyssa) / Ally | Thirty-year-old digital marketing worker in Bath who experiences past-life memories; reincarnated decades later as the founder of children’s bereavement camps. |
| Ash (Asher Hawthorne) / Theo | Nomadic music video location scout who returns to Bath to care for his father; later reincarnated as an Irish music producer turned teacher. |
| Chloe | Lissa’s younger sister, who drowned at age six in the family garden pond. |
| Esme | Lissa’s mother, a retired nurse whose life collapsed into alcoholism and hoarding after Chloe’s death. |
| David | Lissa’s father, a former history teacher who left the family shortly after Chloe’s death. |
| Elsie | Lissa’s fourteen-year-old half-sister, daughter of David and Nicole. |
| Nicole | Lissa’s stepmother, an interior designer. |
| Mia | Lissa’s cousin and confidante, an engineer who relocates to New York. |
| Jack Hawthorne | Ash’s father, a former military officer living with agoraphobia and cognitive decline. |
| Nicola Hawthorne | Ash’s mother, who died suddenly of an aneurysm. |
| Darcy (“Dr D”) | Lissa’s best friend and coworker. |
| Saskia Arthur | Holistic therapist and tarot reader in Bath. |
| Mark | Lissa’s colleague, with whom she has a brief one-night stand. |
| Liam | Lissa’s boss at the digital marketing agency. |
| Lottie | Mia’s partner in New York. |
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Over & Over Summary: The Full Story
Spoilers ahead.
Lissa is thirty and living in Bath, working a job she does not want for a boss named Liam who treats her panic attacks as an inconvenience. She has health anxiety, nightmares about drowning, and a mother who blames her for a death that happened twenty years ago.
On September 16th, the anniversary of six-year-old Chloe’s drowning, Lissa visits Esme. The house is cluttered and cold, and Esme’s bitterness lands squarely on her surviving daughter.
Leaving, Lissa rents an e-scooter and swerves into traffic. A stranger, Ash Hawthorne, pulls her onto the pavement. They meet again at a pub through her colleague Mark, and Lissa learns Ash scouts locations for music videos and is only in Bath temporarily.
Soon after, Lissa begins experiencing flashes that arrive with full sensory detail. She is a schoolteacher in 1950s Paris whose sketchbook is ruined by a composer’s spilled coffee.
She is a young woman in 1920s New York slipping into a speakeasy to dance with a band singer. She is a woman in the 19th-century Scottish Highlands watching a man row toward her across a loch. In every scene, the man is Ash.
Unsettled, Lissa visits Saskia Arthur, a tarot reader in Bath. Saskia lays a Celtic Cross and identifies The Devil as the lord of patterns, telling Lissa she is caught in a repeating cycle and must make a different choice or repeat it again.
Meanwhile, Ash is not in Bath for pleasure. He has returned to care for his father, Jack, a former military officer living with agoraphobia and declining health after the sudden death of Ash’s mother, Nicola. Ash carries guilt over the falls Jack suffered while he was away.
Lissa’s own life moves in parallel. She leans on her cousin Mia, takes encouragement from her best friend Darcy, ends a short fling with Mark, and slowly builds a relationship with her fourteen-year-old half-sister Elsie, the daughter of her father David and stepmother Nicole.
Ash invites Lissa to a cliffside cottage in Cornwall. That night she wades into the sea, and the cold water releases the full record of her past lives.
In 1920s New York, she stays with him instead of following her own path, and an armed robbery outside an alley ends with him stepping in front of a bullet. In 1950s Paris, she accepts his proposal instead of leaving for art school in Florence, and he shoves her clear of a car and is crushed with her.
In 1800s Scotland, she agrees to marry him on the loch and their boat capsizes. Both drown.
Lissa sees the pattern: in every lifetime she chose him over her own calling out of fear, and in every lifetime he died trying to save her. When Ash pulls her from the water she tells him “It’s you” and insists they cannot be together.
Back in Bath, Jack Hawthorne dies, and Lissa attends the woodland funeral. Grieving and worn down, Ash tells her he is leaving the country for good.
A year after their first meeting, on September 16th, Ash stops at Lissa’s flat to say goodbye before his flight. He walks off in heavy rain, and she cannot let him go.
She calls out “Wait,” chases him, and gets into his car, saying she will come with him. On the highway, a lorry skids across the wet road into their lane, and Ash turns the wheel to take the impact himself.
In that instant he looks at her with dark, terrified eyes, and Lissa understands that he remembers everything too. She also understands the truth of the loop: the universe was not punishing her but offering her another chance to forgive herself for Chloe and choose her own life.
She takes his hand on the steering wheel, smiles through her horror, and says “I love you” as the lorry hits.
In an epilogue set thirty years later, Ash’s soul has returned as Theo, a music producer, and Lissa’s as Ally. At Paddington Station, Ally drops her passport and Theo retrieves it, saying she really is his hero.
He invites her for coffee, and she declines politely because she has a flight to Massachusetts for her career. Choosing herself first breaks the fatal cycle.
Fifteen years after that, Ally runs coastal bereavement camps in Cornwall for children coping with loss, having overcome her fear of water. Elsie, now older, works beside her.
On the cliffs one evening, Ally meets Theo again, newly moved into the cottage and training as a music teacher. They walk down to the ocean and swim together as equals, and Ally recognizes that this is the lifetime where they finally get it right.
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Book Details
- Genre & Subgenre: Speculative contemporary fiction / reincarnation romance / magical realism
- Core Narrative Tropes: Soulmates across centuries, tragic reincarnation loop, savior dynamic, tarot prophecy, childhood grief
- Tone & Atmosphere: Introspective, bittersweet, atmospheric, and ultimately hopeful
- Primary Conflict: Lissa’s survival guilt and her attempt to break a multi-lifetime cycle of premature death
- Pacing Style: Linear contemporary narrative in Bath punctuated by sensory past-life sequences
- Book Structure: 35 chapters, including a prologue, 32 main chapters, two epilogue chapters set thirty and forty-five years later, plus acknowledgments and a reading group section
- ISBN: 978-1538773307 (ISBN-10: 1538773309)
- Pages: 416
Quotes from Over & Over
“‘Lissa.’ Her name is an interruption. ‘You don’t need to explain it to me. That kind of grief … it never really leaves you. I get it. Trust me.'”
“‘I’m pretty sure that when I look at you, I do see the broken parts.’ Her breath hitches just a little as he holds her gaze. ‘I’m pretty sure that when I look at you, I see all of you.'”
“‘Often with these things it’s not about the specifics, but about something much more general. And I have found that sometimes it seems as if a present life is giving us a chance to right the wrongs of the past.'”
“‘An accident, Bissa. And Esme … she’s put all this weight on you, blamed you because she couldn’t stand to blame herself – and you have let her.'”
“The universe is offering her a chance, each time, to get it right. To try and forgive herself for what happened to her sister and move on. To choose herself, in this moment, and not him.”
Books Like Over & Over
- One Day by David Nicholls – A decades-spanning structure that follows two people across years of near-misses and returns to the same date.
- Novels by Jojo Moyes – Emotionally direct British contemporary fiction centered on grief, caregiving, and second chances.
- One Moment by Becky Hunter – The author’s debut, built around a single sudden tragedy and the way it reshapes the people left behind.
- Meet Me When My Heart Stops by Becky Hunter – A high-concept love story dealing with soulmates and the boundary between life and death.
- The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger – A relationship disrupted by a non-linear timeline the characters cannot control.
- Life After Life by Kate Atkinson – A protagonist who lives the same life repeatedly, with each version shaped by different choices.
- The Midnight Library by Matt Haig – A speculative framework used to examine regret, alternate choices, and the value of an ordinary life.
